


close the loop

by INMH



Series: Merry Month of Masturbation Fills (2019) [16]
Category: It Follows (2014)
Genre: Angst, Death, Drama, F/F, Graphic Description, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Masturbation, Matter of Life and Death, Merry Month of Masturbation Challenge, Other, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Suicide, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-01-16 01:50:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18511471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Maybe she can stop it.





	close the loop

_Maybe_ -  
  
She can try.  
  
It’s partly born of morbid curiosity and a desire to interrupt, even break the cycle. Break the endless chain of victims and stop the curse from passing on to another person.  
  
_I could die._  
  
She’ll die anyway, even if she’s right.  
  
Statistically speaking she can’t run forever; at some point her luck will end, and she’ll find herself trapped with It where she can’t escape. Eventually she will tire, stop running, and let the inevitable happen.  
  
(Or she’ll pass it on.)  
  
But even if she does, there’s no comfort, no _real_ escape.  
  
The girl she got it from, some random hookup from a college party, told her (dead-eyed, flat-toned) that she’d passed it on before- to a boy, one she didn’t know, from a random encounter. She’d warned him about It after they’d finished, and he’d walked away, weirded out and uninterested in hearing her crazy-talk.  
  
“It broke his dick,” She’d said mildly, not at all bothered by the fact that she’d condemned this nameless boy to death. “Like, it bent it in half. His legs and arms were broken too. There might have been other injuries. I don’t know- I didn’t look for too long. It killed him and went right back to wanting me. Pass it on, and tell them to pass it on. Just keep passing it down the line.”  
  
“But if they all die, It comes for _us_ again.”  
  
“What other choice do we have?”  
  
She’d walked away from the girl, disgusted.  
  
_I won’t pass it on,_ she decided, bull-headed and certain of her morality. _It’s no better than murdering them myself._  
  
But she is human, and she is weak; months of being chased by It have worn her down. She has entertained the idea more than once in those moments of weakness, that perhaps it would be simpler to pass it on.  
  
But eventually she remembers that it is borrowed time: Eventually, It will come for her again; the ones who pass it on will fall into complacency, won’t keep track of the ones they pass it on to, and then It will work through them like a virus on a compromised immune system; they won’t see it coming, so they won’t fight back. They will fall like dominos until it gets back to her.  
  
No. Passing it on only delays the inevitable; it does not solve the problem.  
  
And she becomes obsessed with solving the problem. Her family is worried about her: She has not come home for Christmas, she’s quit her job, and she’s been missing classes. She can’t remember the last time she had a conversation with anyone that lasted more than a moment or two (long enough to order food, long enough to make transactions, long enough to assure her parents she’s still alive). She feels the walls closing in around her. If she cannot solve this problem, the problem of It, she will be saving a life that will be unsalvageable.  
  
Her greatest fear is her parents will suspect mental disorder and have her committed. There will be no running if she’s in a hospital, and any panic and attempts to escape It will be seen as delusions. The doctors will not be able to protect her from what they cannot see, and It is not shy about attacking around others.  
  
She’s learned this much from observation:  
  
It can temporarily be stopped by doors and walls.  
  
It takes multiple forms, including friends and family of the target.  
  
It does not talk.  
  
It can be injured.  
  
It doesn’t care if there are witnesses.  
  
It cannot be seen by anyone other than the target (or previous targets).  
  
It does not run.  
  
It always walks at the same, slow pace.  
  
She suspects It isn’t always walking; mad calculations done on sheets of paper (when she last saw It and when It next appeared) have accounted for many delays, and still It seems to move faster than is possible at its usual pace. She theorizes that It dematerializes when out of range of the target (‘The Target’ sounds so much better, so much more detached, than ‘Me’) and rematerializes after a certain time, within a certain distance of the target. Further observation would be needed to determine the specifics.  
  
It takes weeks (of running, exhaustion, terror, mind-scrambling isolation) before a potential solution occurs; when it does, she laughs at the simplicity of it.  
  
_Masturbation. Why didn’t I think of it sooner?_  
  
It is passed on through sexual intercourse, whether between men and women, women and women, or men and men. She has tried to think of the connotations of this (penetration cannot be the common factor, as the sex she’d had with her own infector had not been penetrative) and it enrages her that she cannot interview other targets for more information. Had they received It from oral sex? Had they been fingered, or had they been traditionally penetrated? Had they used sex toys?  
  
She doesn’t know what degree of sexual contact It needs to pass on.  
  
And masturbation provides a surprising possibility.  
  
She considers that perhaps by having sex with herself, essentially, she could pass the curse _on_ to herself again. The logic is flawed, perhaps, and it does not solve _her_ problem: She concedes that if this does somehow interrupt the cycle of passing on It to others, she will still be It’s target and will still, eventually, be tracked down and killed.  
  
_Surely someone has tried this before._  
  
_Surely I’m not the first._  
  
But maybe she is.  
  
Maybe the others were so obsessed with delaying the inevitable that it hadn’t occurred to them that they could try something different.  
  
_Maybe it will do nothing._  
  
_Maybe if you break down and fuck someone later It will still move on._  
  
But this is about trying anything.  
  
Nothing is off the table.  
  
So she will try.  
  
She has masturbated before, slow movements over her clit to some amateur porn on the internet- she favors videos of massage tables and women rubbing their oiled breasts. The release she’s felt in the past has been beautiful.  
  
Right now, there is no beauty. She does this because she has to, and she does it with mechanical efficiency. Those previous times had been a matter of pleasure, of scratching that natural itch for sex; this was an experiment, something that she was doing to attempt to thwart the creature that had preyed on that human itch for sexual contact with others so that it could spread and feed. It takes longer than usual because there’s no heat or desire behind it. The only desire she has is for answers, for some semblance of clarity, and that does not fuel the tank of sexual pleasure.  
  
When she comes, it’s muted. She’s had powerful orgasms in the past with the proper physical and mental stimulation, and there is none of that now. She yanks her pants and underwear up with ruthless efficiency and goes on watch.  
  
It doesn’t come that night; she does not allow herself to see that as a good sign, and that’s good, because it takes three nights for It to find her again.  
  
It is no different, behaviorally speaking: It takes the form of a half-dressed man, complete with a blank-stare and stony expression. It walks with that same easy pace it always does, like it has all the time in the world.  
  
(It does.)  
  
(She is the one on borrowed time.)  
  
She takes off in her car, the one that’s probably due to be repossessed because she hasn’t been making the payments. It stares after her as It grows smaller in her rearview mirror, pausing only briefly to watch as she goes.  
  
_How do I know if I’ve closed the loop?_  
  
She wonders, and knows the answer.  
  
_I have to sleep with someone else._  
  
It’s not condemning them, she reasons, half-mad with lack of sleep and food and water. Not really. After all, there’s a chance she’s just stopped it from moving on again. There’s a chance they will walk away without It following them. She will find someone and trail them, wait for It to manifest and see who It follows.  
  
If It follows them- well, that’s an experiment failed.  
  
If It follows her, there is the joy of a successful experiment.  
  
Regardless, It will follow her again eventually.  
  
And when It does, she will go home.  
  
She wants to go home, at least for the end of it. She has been alone for months, so obsessed and terrified in her quest to stop It, and she yearns for significant human contact, especially with her parents. She will tell them that she is tired, that she thinks she’s had a mild breakdown over the course-load she’s had this year. She will smile tiredly and hug them and tell them she loves them, and that she just needs a break and maybe a trip to the doctor. She will be calm and compliant and assure them that she knows there’s a problem that needs to be solved.  
  
Because there is.  
  
And she will solve it by removing her father’s hunting rifle from the locked cabinet downstairs and positioning the barrel under her chin.  
  
It follows her.  
  
But It will not take her.  
  
-End


End file.
